LITERATURE LOST IN THE THICKETS

By Frederick Turner; Frederick Turner is the author of ''Rediscovering America: John Muir in His Time and Ours.''

Published: February 15, 1987

UNTIL Henry David Thoreau in the middle of the 19th century, America had no great literature of place and scarcely even the beginnings of such a tradition. Here is an extraordinary cultural phenomenon once we begin to think about it, since it tells us that Americans after 200 years had not yet learned to make significant artistic use of the magnificent lands they called their own. Instead, their energies were expended in obliterating as much as possible of that original landscape and transforming the eastern portion of the country into a recognizable facsimile of the Old World. By the time of the Romantic movement here those who, like Thoreau, wished to celebrate American places were inheritors of a littered, occasionally even blasted landscape bearing scant resemblance to that encountered by the first whites. Before American places had ever been celebrated many of them had been so altered that no one could remember what they had once been like, nor could anyone recall what had happened in them. Americans believed they lived in a historical landscape and behaved accordingly, and so instead of poems and paintings memorializing their lands they would have for their monuments toll roads, treeless villages with the names of antiquity slapped across them, and stump fields. This is not to say that before Thoreau there were not a great many literary descriptions of American places, but these descriptions belong to the vast literature of exploration and settlement, and in it there is a persistent negativity: the emotional compass bearings of its authors remained on those places of the Old World from which they or their immediate forebears had come. In the Spanish accounts of shipwreck and disaster, the perils of the French Jesuit priests (the ''black robes''), the terrific hardships of settlers, the whole huge genre of the captivity narrative, and indeed most of the literature of the early republic, the modern reader, searching for some authentic sense of place, some Continued on page 34 assent to the land, becomes a kind of wilderness wanderer himself, lost in a thicket of resistance. He feels that for these literary pioneers the real world was always elsewhere, not wherever in America they were suffered to be. IF, however, we were to draw a more generous and accurate definition of American literature so as to include the oral literatures of Native Americans, then we would also have a strong, early tradition of the literature of place. For in these tribal literatures there are hundreds of narratives and songs that are truly born of particular places. Emergence myths, in which either a people or its cultural hero comes right up out of a particular soil, are common in the tribal lore of every region of America except the Northwest. So too, myths wherein the land speaks to the people and informs them of their place in the grand scheme of creation. In a Seneca myth, for instance, the people are instructed in the history of the world and of their place in it by a boulder that speaks to them in a forest clearing. Here, quite literally, the people identify themselves by a place, the totality of which they must subsequently come to understand.

The North American tribes weren't unique in this regard. Once, the traditions of all peoples were founded on a sense of place as strong as smell, immediate as touch, and yet beyond the sensory. For the land itself was thought to be a living thing, and its various features - caves, groves, mountains, rivers - were believed to lie under the protection of numerous guardian spirits. Before a stream could be tasted or bathed in, before a grove might be pruned, a field cleared and planted, propitiatory rites had to be scrupulously observed. This was a numinous world, and in addition to its considerable spiritual benefits it conferred on artists a glorious stock of characters, plots and metaphors. Here is the source of the encompassing authority and assurance more modern writers found in the work of the ancients.

Such an attitude toward land and particular places in it had long been superseded in Western civilization by the time of the discovery and exploration of the Americas. Still, a desacralized memory of it lived on in European peoples and in their literature and other arts. And, of course, in the Renaissance - the great age of exploration - the old beliefs were encountered anew. Mythology as a living system of belief might be dead, the sacred groves cut down, but the memory that here in this special place or that there had once been such a grove, that the place had a long and rich history, lent European writers an assurance their struggling American counterparts could but hopelessly envy.

Two centuries after Renaissance Europeans had made a beachhead on the Atlantic seaboard, our writers were bemoaning the fact that as Americans they hadn't any such assurance, no deep, extrapersonal authority to their voices. Unsponsored, they had to raise those voices in a land now no longer wilderness but still so raw and lacking in ''culture'' that in it literature could easily seem a foolish anachronism. Here there were no usable traditions, only the untranslatable ones of the savage or the bestial brags of the frontier, those literary equivalents of gouging contests where men tore out each other's eyes with blackened fingers. Surveying the national literary prospects in 1815, the critic and writer Walter Channing guessed writers might have to go back to the Indian in an attempt to recover a sense of place. A good insight, except that in Channing's description of the Indian's alleged oratorical genius it was clear the writer had in mind the Indian as invented by the white man, a stagy and paper-thin simulacrum after all.